A chemical building block for many pharmaceutical and consumer products can be synthesized using a new catalyst. A team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam developed the catalyst as a means to what they say is a simple and sustainable route to substituted 1H-indenes.

Research leader Bas de Bruin. Image source: Jeroen Oerlemans. Indene is a colorless liquid polycyclic hydrocarbon, or compound, used in making a variety of natural products, pharmaceuticals and other bio-active compounds. Indene also has application in metal complexes for catalytic use in olefin polymerization, for example. As such, researchers say that demand exists for development of fast, efficient and broadly applicable methods for indene synthesis from readily available starting materials.

The development resulted from the research team’s bio-inspired approach in the field of so-called “metallo-radical catalysis.” Research Director Bas de Bruin says the concept of metallo-radical catalysis enables chemists to move away from the current use of noble metal catalysts and, instead, use less expensive and abundant metals. In this case, the new catalytic complex is based on the element cobalt.

University of Amsterdam researchers also recently developed other catalysts using the sustainable-chemistry concept. This includes one for the selective catalytic oxidation of activated alcohols with air, or molecular oxygen.

This catalyst also contains no expensive noble metals, such as platinum or palladium, but is made mostly of carbon, with amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and cobalt, iron or copper. It can create selective peroxide-like reagents and uses them to oxidize alcohols to carbonyl compounds in a dual-action mechanism.